Their officers were still within the walls, and when the dust and smoke cleared away, they were still missing. Search was made, and the bodies of Captain Dundas and Lieutenant Nugent were found lying under the _débris_. Both officers were dead. It is conjectured that the time-fuses, instead of burning slowly, flared up like a train of powder, and that the mines exploded a few seconds after the fuses were lighted. We have thus lost two good officers by an accident which might have been prevented if the equipment of the Sappers had not been cut down by the parsimony of the Government. So few fuses were sent up from India when the force advanced upon Cabul that the engineers had to make others, and these were of course defective. It was two of these which were being used when the explosion occurred. While the cavalry were covering the operations of the Sappers, several thousand men marched from the Bala Hissar and opened fire upon the 9th Lancers and the 5th Punjab Cavalry on Siah Sung. Several men were hit, and Captain Gambier, of the 5th Punjab Cavalry, was wounded by a bullet passing through his thigh. The Cavalry withdrew under the heavy fire directed against them, and for a few hours the Afghans remained on the heights with banners planted. They retired to the city at nightfall, and all the villages between Sherpur and Cabul are now quite deserted. While the attack was being made on the eastern defences, three or four thousand men had kept up an incessant fire at the southern wall, and such a rain of bullets fell about the Commissariat and 72nd Gates that many of our camp-followers in cantonments were wounded. Kila Mahomed Sharif and the King’s Garden were full of Afghans, and two 18-pounders and two mountain guns shelled them until late in the afternoon, while the marksmen behind the walls shot down such men as retreated across the open. Dead bodies were seen lying in the fields, and two or three scaling-ladders, so heavy that six men would have been needed to carry them, were scattered about on the ground less than a thousand yards away. When the Afghans on the southern side saw our cavalry sweeping over Siah Sung, they began to retire hastily to the city, and as they crossed the road 1,000 yards away from our bastions, they were fired at from the 72nd Gateway, and many were seen to fall even at that distance. The men who stopped to carry off the dead behaved in the coolest way, one Afghan returning again and again to drag off the bodies of his comrades. Earlier in the day four men were killed by a volley at 600 yards, and two or three who escaped tried to face the bullets which swept the ground about their dead. Finding it was certain death to appear in the open, they crawled behind a wall, and with a long crooked stick dragged their dead away. Several of the best marksmen of Mahomed Jan, who had come daily to the same posts and fired persistently at the ramparts, were shot to-day, our men having at last got the exact ranges.